Discovered: The world's longest diary - all 3.75 million words of it

When Reverend Robert Shields decided to start a diary, his decision seemed nothing out of the ordinary.

However, that was until the pastor's rather eccentric approach to journal keeping led to the creation of a 3.75 million word magnum opus documenting a quarter of a century.

Not content to adopt the usual method of jotting down a few words every evening, Rev Shields, who died earlier this month aged 89, spent hours every day devotedly chronicling his life in five-minute segments.

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This included his trips to the toilet (he had three dozen ways of describing urination), his musings on God, every piece of junk mail he had and the cost of virtually everything he bought.

In addition to all this, he regularly kept records of his body temperature and blood pressure. He also clipped a nostril hair to a page so future scientists could study his DNA.

Rev Shields was nothing if not committed and only slept for two-hours at a time so he could describe his dreams. In a good year he wrote three million words but only managed a million in a bad one.

Visitors would frequently find him ensconsed in his back-porch office and sporting just his thermal underwear, clattering away at one of his six typewriters.

The pastor, who lived in Dayton, Washington, began keeping his diary on a whim in 1972 and continued until 1997 when he suffered a massive stroke which left him disabled.

His approach was apparently inspired by the discovery celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys mentioned a teapot, but failed to describe it.

Rev Shields seemed to find this method somewhat lacking in rigour and by the time ill-health cut his career short, his work was almost 30 times longer than Pepys' 17th century tome.

Even this was not enough for the prolific pastor who attempted to continue his journals by dictating entries to his wife Grace; unfortunately this stalled after she got bored.

The diary was handed over to Washington State University in 91 boxes in 1999 but Rev Shields would only part with it after the institution agreed it would not be read, or subjected to a word count for 50 years.

He once told an interviewer: "Maybe by looking into someone's life at that depth, every minute of every day, they will find out something about all people. I don't know. No way to tell.

"It is an uninhibited diary. It is spontaneous. I type it as it comes and I don't correct it and I don't edit it.

"You might say I'm a nut. We are driven by compulsions we don't know."

Rev Shields had one other claim to fame; he once wrote a book which became the basis for Elvis Presley's first film, Love Me Tender.

As well as working as a teacher, he also wrote 1,200 poems and once said he believed maybe only five or six of them were any good.